The Global Read:Trump administration seeks new path forward with tariffs after first attempt hit roadblocks

Friday, 5 June 2026

President Donald Trump is in a hurry to rebuild the tariff wall the Supreme Court tore down less than four months ago.

The administration this week has proposed slapping double-digit tariffs on products from dozens of major US trading partners after an investigation into imports of goods allegedly made with forced labour. And more tariffs are likely coming.

Under the proposal released in Washington late Tuesday, 16 economies — including Canada, Mexico, the European Union, Taiwan and the United Kingdom — would face 10% levies for allegedly failing to enforce bans on forced labour. Another 44 trading partners — including China, Japan, India, South Korea and Switzerland — would be hit with 12.5% import taxes.

The tariffs are part of Trump's push to replace revenue lost when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down sweeping global tariffs he'd imposed last year. This latest barrage is likely to unsettle key trading partners that have been hit with waves of tariffs since Trump returned to the White House early last year.

“The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labour is unacceptable,' US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a statement. 'This creates a dynamic where American workers are forced to compete globally on an un-level playing field.''

Greer's office said failure to prevent such imports is 'unreasonable and burdens or restricts US commerce.'

Trump's tariffs are paid by US importers who usually try to pass along those higher costs to customers.

The administration, mindful that Americans are growing increasingly unsettled by high prices with midterm elections just months away, said that it would limit the impact by exempting from the latest proposed tariffs a long list of products, including aircraft parts, food products (from coffee to beef) and rare earth minerals crucial in the production of smartphones and cars. Also spared would be products from Canada and Mexico covered by a North American trade pact.

The new tariffs would not take effect immediately. They are subject to public comment and review. Public hearings on the proposed duties are due to begin on July 7.

The plan drew immediate pushback. A Chinese government spokesperson denied the forced labour allegation and called for resolving economic issues through dialogue, saying a trade war doesn’t serve anyone’s interests.

“There is no such thing as forced labour in China, and we oppose using it as an excuse to engage in political manipulation,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said in Beijing.

The US has long said imports of goods that include material from China’s far-western Xinjiang are at risk of using forced labour. Beijing denies allegations of forced labour in the Muslim majority region.

But critics saw the proposed tariffs as a pretext to reinstate tariffs on dozens of countries across the globe that hadn’t passed legal muster.

“Accusing EU of not doing enough against forced labour is absurd,″ Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee, posted on social media. “The EU has adopted the world’s most stringent rules against products made with forced labour. This looks very much like trying to make the facts fit a legal justification for tariffs that has already been decided.″

The new manoeuvre shows how determined the Trump administration is about keeping a wall of tariffs around the American economy, the world’s largest, despite repeated setbacks in court.

In February, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump had overstepped his authority by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose double-digit tariffs on almost every country on Earth last year. The justices struck down the tariffs and set the stage for companies who paid them to seek refunds.

After the loss in court, Trump turned to another law to impose temporary 10% tariffs globally. But those stopgap levies expire July 24. And a specialised trade court ruled last month that they, too, were illegal – though the government can continue collecting them while that case works its way through the courts.

Trump’s tariffs have provided tens of billions of dollars in revenue for a federal government that persistently spends more than it collects in taxes. He had been counting on the IEEPA tariffs to make up for some of the revenue lost to his massive 2025 tax cuts.

But tariff collections have begun to fall since the legal defeats. They peaked at more than $31 billion last October but were down to $22 billion in both March and April of this year, according to the Treasury Department.

Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have vowed to replace the lost revenue. And they’ve turned to a legal authority that has withstood legal challenges in the past: Section 301 of Trade Act of 1974, which authorises tariffs and other sanctions against countries found to engage in “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” trade practices. Trump used Section 301 to impose big tariffs on China in his first term.

'What's somewhat brilliant about this way of approaching 301 is that politically it's very hard to argue that you shouldn't go after forced labour and force countries to enforce forced labour laws on the books,'' said trade lawyer Ryan Majerus, a partner at King & Spalding and a former US trade official.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said his government will soon introduce legislation on forced labour in supply chains. “Canada has a very strong legislative regime against forced labour in supply chains,” Carney told reporters in Ottawa. “We don’t want any element of forced labour coming in goods and services, and we want to use our influence to eliminate this practice of forced labour and child labour.”

In its nearly 100-page report on forced labour, the USTR said that even if a country enforces a ban on forced labour domestically, importing goods made with forced labour violates the rules of fair trade.

Majerus expects to the new tariffs to be ready by the time the temporary ones expire next month. “The USTR is under enormous pressure to make sure there's no gap (in tariff revenue), probably from the White House,'' he said. ”I'm confident, based on the schedule they're on now, that they will have these done and ready to implement.'' He noted that the investigation on forced labour is 'working at about two times the normal speed'' of typical 301 cases.

The administration is also pursuing a Section 301 case into whether 16 US trading partners (accounting for 70% of U.S. imports) — including China, the EU and Japan — are overproducing goods, driving down prices and putting US manufacturers at a disadvantage.

And on Monday the administration proposed 25% Section 301 tariffs on Brazil, charging that the world's 10th-biggest economy with 'unreasonable'' trade practices including lax anti-corruption enforcement and unfair tariffs of its own.

Tuesday's report defined forced labour as “work or service exacted from a person under the menace of any penalty for its non-performance and for which the worker does not offer himself voluntarily.”

It cited an estimate by the UN’s International Labour Organisation that as of 2021, 27.6 million people were engaged in forced labour.

Rice imported from Myanmar, tobacco from Malawi, beef from Brazil, and cotton and polysilicon from China were among the many products it said are prone to involving forced labour.

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Elaine Kurtenbach reported from Bangkok.

Rob Gillies in Toronto contributed to this story.